Support this Site

Linked by Dan Moren

Lisa Eadicicco at TIME reports that Amazon may soon roll out a feature to recognize different voices:

Amazon has been developing this capability, internally called Voice ID, since at least the summer of 2015. It remained on the Alexa roadmap as recently as late last summer, but it’s unclear when or if the feature will launch. The underlying technology has been completed; it’s just a matter of integrating the feature into Echo products, one of the sources claimed.

Obviously, the big advantages of this are being able to tailor results to a particular person—especially in cases related to personal information, like calendar events, and so on—and authentication. As the article points out, this could mean requiring a parent’s voice to authorize a purchase, so kids (or the TV) don’t order dollhouses.1

Then kids will be forced to trick their parents into saying all the words they need, record them, and patch them together, Sneakers-style. ↩